Cloud Storage Specialist Panzura Raises $25 Million

Cloud storage company Panzura announced that it has closed a $25 million Series D funding round led by late-stage funding experts Meritech Capital Partners with participation from its existing investors Matrix Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Opus Capital and Chevron Technology Ventures. The additional $25 million brings the company’s total backing to $58 million and is expected to fund the company through profitability.

Panzura will expand its international sales presence into the Asia-Pacific region, while continuing to scale its U.S.-based and EMEA-based marketing, sales and engineering operations. It will also aggressively expand its channel ecosystem and explore joint development projects with strategic partners, while continuing a concerted emphasis on internal research and product development.

“The explosion in unstructured data and the desire to make files available to a global, distributed workforce are rendering traditional enterprise file storage infrastructure obsolete,” said Paul Madera, managing director at Meritech Capital Partners. “Panzura’s solution delivers cloud storage to the enterprise in a scalable, high performance solution that slashes capital expenditures while enabling seamless global file sharing.”

After growing its customer base by 700 percent in 2012, Panzura has already exceeded 2012 bookings thus far in 2013. The company offers a cloud-integrated storage system capable of delivering an enterprise-class solution, with network attached storage functionality, native cloud support, a globally distributed file system, built-in FIPS 140-2 certified security and data protection, as well as high speed data transfer rates to and from the cloud. Panzura boasts some large companies as customers, and claims the largest number of petabytes under management, due to its success. Gartner named Panzura a “Cool Vendor” in storage technology for 2013.

“Panzura is delighted to be adding the expertise of our new partners at Meritech, and particularly late-stage funding guru Paul Madera to our board, and we are encouraged by the ongoing support of our existing longtime partners,” said Randy Chou, CEO and co-founder of Panzura. “Panzura provides the only viable cloud-based solution for the enterprise, directly enabling high-value business objectives – such as improved cost, scale, management, availability and global access – while fitting seamlessly into existing IT infrastructures. With the support of this Series D round, Panzura looks forward to profitability and the further innovation and development of global cloud-integrated storage solutions.”

About the Author

John Rath is a veteran IT professional and regular contributor at Data Center Knowledge. He has served many roles in the data center, including support, system administration, web development and facility management.

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